Although coarticulatory variation is largely systematic, and serves as useful information for listeners, such variation is nonetheless linked to sound change. This article explores the articulatory and perceptual interactions between a coarticulatory source and its effects, and how these interactions likely contribute to change. The focus is on…

This dissertation addresses the extent to which linguistic behavior can be described in terms of the projection of patterns from existing lexical items, through an investigation of Korean reduplication. Korean has a productive pattern of reduplication in which a consonant is inserted in a vowel-initial base, illustrated by forms such as "alok"--"t…

Background: School-aged children with persisting speech sound disorders (SSDs) may show little improvement in speech accuracy following phonological or articulation therapy. Aims: To determine the effects of establishing consonant production in facilitative vowel contexts for a 7-year-old boy (CD) with persisting post-alveolar fronting. CD had…

Purpose: This study presents an analysis of language skills in individuals with Noonan syndrome (NS), an autosomal dominant genetic disorder. We investigated whether the language impairments affecting some individuals arise from deficits specifically within the linguistic system or whether they are associated with cognitive, perceptual, and motor…

Listeners' identification of young children's productions of minimally contrastive words and predictive relationships between accurately identified words and intelligibility scores obtained from a 100-word spontaneous speech sample were determined for 36 children with typically developing speech (TDS) and 36 children with speech sound disorders…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to determine if a semi-occluded vocal tract could be used to measure phonation threshold pressure. This is in contrast to the shutter technique, where an alternation between a fully occluded tract and an unoccluded tract is used. Method: Five male and 5 female volunteers phonated through a thin straw held…

This dissertation examines the relationship between the structural, phonemic properties of vowel inventories and their acoustic phonetic realization, with particular focus on the adequacy of Dispersion Theory, which maintains that inventories are structured so as to maximize perceptual contrast between their component vowels. In order to assess…

Hemispherectomy (disconnection or removal of an entire cerebral hemisphere) is a rare surgical procedure used for the relief of drug-resistant epilepsy in children. After hemispherectomy, contralateral hemiplegia persists whereas gross expressive and receptive language functions can be remarkably spared. Motor speech deficits have rarely been…

The question of whether or not linguistic sounds might convey inherent meaning has never conclusively been resolved. This is an empirical study weighing evidence for and against the existence of phonosemantics, also known as sound symbolism or iconism. Contrary to well established principles such as the arbitrary nature of the sign and the double…

Background: Currently, clinicians mainly rely on perceptual judgements to assess intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Although often highly reliable, this procedure is subjective with a lot of intrinsic variables. Therefore, certain benefits can be expected from a speech technology-based intelligibility assessment. Previous attempts to develop an…

Children with residual speech sound errors are often underserved clinically, yet there has been a lack of recent research elucidating the specific deficits in this population. Adolescents aged 10-14 with residual speech sound errors (RE) that included rhotics were compared to normally speaking peers on tasks assessing speed and accuracy of speech…

The current study aimed to use electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to investigate the effect of increasing word length on lingual kinematics in acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). Tongue-tip and tongue-back movement was recorded for five speakers with AOS and a concomitant aphasia (mean age = 53.6 years; SD = 12.60) during target consonant…

Purpose: This research assessed the influence of visual speech on phonological processing by children with hearing loss (HL). Method: Children with HL and children with normal hearing (NH) named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors whose onsets relative to the pictures were either congruent, conflicting in…

Purpose: To assess, in children and adults, the breadth of coarticulatory movements associated with a single rounded vowel. Method: Upper and lower lip movements were recorded from 8 young adults and 8 children (aged 4-5 years). A single rounded versus unrounded vowel was embedded in the medial position of pairs of 7-word/7-syllable sentences.…

Speech perception requires the integration of information from multiple phonetic and phonological dimensions. Numerous studies have investigated the mapping between multiple acoustic-phonetic dimensions and single phonological dimensions (e.g., spectral and temporal properties of stop consonants in voicing contrasts). Many fewer studies have…